Like many artists I spend much of my time doing stuff to make a living, some of it ok, some bearable and some the kind of work one does whilst thinking, so much an hour will fix the gutter, or this will get me three tanks of petrol, or at best, that Corb chair that I want. What Civitella gave me was the opportunity to spend time on my internal life. For some years now I have been working on ideas of love and sexuality, how in some ways love is an index of memory, our own but also the memories (or instructions to love) that we inherit. As a gay man I am struck by the inevitable connection between acts of love and memorializing. Each kiss is a re-inscription of those that other men have made. My freedom to love is weighted by acts other men have done, often with a cost attached. The collection of work I started at Civitella and am now completing is titled “Love’s Ballast”. It attempts to image a vocabulary of skin, porous with memories of others before me.

From the series, ‘Love’s Ballast,’ 2003, monoprints

From the series, ‘Love’s Ballast,’ 2003, monoprints